


One puff...

by Elphen



Series: Love Me, Leave Me [2]
Category: Lewis (TV)
Genre: Cigarettes, HEC-add, M/M, not so vague this time
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-29
Updated: 2012-12-29
Packaged: 2017-11-22 21:57:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 535
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/614787
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Elphen/pseuds/Elphen
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Old habits may die hard, but they can kill you easily</p>
            </blockquote>





	One puff...

**Author's Note:**

> Again, sorry for title and summary, I really honestly am no good making them up.  
> Seems like I wasn't done with these death-fics, so have another one. No betas or britpicks, just my mistakes in my own words

He’s told him. More than a few times over the years he’s told him. Mostly in snide side comments that’s been more as harmlessly poking fun than a serious accusation. Perhaps he should have been more in earnest, really put some serious concern into it all. Then maybe, just maybe, he wouldn’t be sitting here now, beside a still frame that only recently held a living person. They’d still be a couple of strange awkward sods who could fight the world because they had each other instead of having the world fight them by leaving them here.

He’s been here before, being the one left behind. Too often it’s happened, really, and he’s tired. Tired of being the one having to soldier on, to pick up the pieces after another loss of a loved one. He wonders at times that if there is some divine being up there, they must have a seriously twisted sense of humour. Gallows humour, quite literally.

It had been too far advanced when it’d been discovered. The stupid sod hadn’t even wanted to go see a doctor, insisting that he was fine and taking another drag at that damnable white stick. When he’d finally been dragged there and the test had been done, there’d been nothing to do. The cancer was in his lungs and had spread throughout his body. He had only a few months at the most.

They’d tried to make the most of it. If nothing else, it had resulted in them finally being honest with each other, but the bliss of being together romantically at last had been marred by the ever-louder ticking imagined timer. Of course all lives have a timer, but to have a time limit so clear had been heart-breaking.

Now here he is, at another bedside that has become a deathbed and while he knows Laura is standing behind him, lending him as much silent support as she can, it stills feels as if he’s all alone, the tendrils of clammy cold loneliness creeping ever closer. Alone with yet another broken heart and this time he’s not sure he wants to pick up the pieces. He’s not even certain there are enough pieces left to put together into a somewhat functioning human being.

It’s tempting to just lay his head down and fall asleep, never to wake again. But death rarely comes when you want it and it doesn’t seem like it’ll make another visit to this room today. That and he knows he’d be told off for even contemplating it by the man beside him, how stupid and fruitless it’d be. Never mind that this loss has been just as utterly fruitless and stupid. The man never had the same concern for himself that he had for others.

An image stirs in his frozen mind and he smiles wistfully at the absurd way the mind sometimes works. It’s a slogan from an old anti-smoking campaign with an Irish cigarette devil or something. ‘Never say yes to a cigarette’. Wise words indeed.

“I love you, you damn, stupid sod. When I see you in the next world, I’ll damn well punch you for leaving me. One puff and you're a goner, indeed.”

**Author's Note:**

> Lewis (and I) is mixing up things - I haven't got the foggiest if the add with "Never say yes to a cigarette" I thought of is American or what - probably is, though, it having Superman in. But there *is* a British cartoon "Dying for a smoke" that has the devil Nick O'Teen in it, too. It's on youtube.  
> Not much to say - got it all wrong, probably, but feel free to leave feedback ;)


End file.
